Before paying out on a claim, the insurer would need to identify what caused the loss/damage to the item that is insured in order to determine whether the incident that caused the damage is covered by the policy. Sometimes when a claim occurs, the exact cause of the damage is not always clear or there may have been one or more potential causes that could have led to the damage.
An insurer will use claims handlers and loss adjusters to investigate the cause of the claim and they will use their expertise to identify the “Proximate Cause” of the damage. This term relates to the cause that is the most likely reason that an incident occurred that consequentially gave rise to the loss or damage that the claimant is trying to gain compensation for.